I’m not only deeply moved and inspired after reading Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, but also feel like I have concrete ways to change the world. Unlike many books lamenting our current monetary system, it provides a larger framework, specific examples, and action steps to reverse the conflict between our financial system and long-term survival. Quoting not only Marx and Keynes, but also leading Wall Street insiders, he shows how negative interest and the inclusion of extrinsic costs would encourage environmental stewardship, move capital out of the hands of the rich and back into circulation where it can do good, restore the huge amount of what used to be collective property back into the public domain, and help reverse money’s tendency to disconnect, instead helping us come back together.

Eisenstein’s sacredness has appeal to both the deist and the athiest, and isn’t rooted in any particular religion or ideology beyond the desire to make money serve people rather than the other way around. Sacred is largely defined as “non-commodified.” Money in its current form functions largely to motivate us to take that which is public and make it private, take that which was free and find a way to charge for it. Like many current financial system polemicists, he believes the current interest-driven system will collapse, and fairly soon. Unlike them, he shows up the changes he’s proposing can be used with exiting infrastructure in a gradual way to bring it more in line with human values *without* a total collapse or the necessity, however appealing, of eating the rich. Despite the fact that some of it’s main proposals have already been considered by organizations as in bed with the current system as the FED, it’s unlikely the political will to implement his plan exists, but if things get much worse and people start defaulting on their loans in irreversible droves, I plan on using his framework to suggest my own course of action.

And when that time comes, I intend to be ready.

I’m also very interested in creating a game based on a simple model of his ideas. Like many readers, I can get his reasoning in bits and pieces, but seeing how things would change in a real working model, however approximate, would make it *much* easier for people to understand and get behind his approach. I e-mailed him and asked if he knew a good place to start looking. We’ll see if he replies.